The history of science is rife with stories of cases where a person or team, usually with a lot of clout, reached a conclusion that seemed incontrovertible. When that occurs, we often find that subsequent measurements agree with that conclusion, even if that conclusion later turns out to be wrong.

This was the case for measurements of the speed of light and for the various masses of fundamental and composite particles during most of the 20th century. Could that also be the case for cosmology, and in particular for cosmological parameters like dark matter, dark energy and the expansion rate of the Universe?

@Wow #1: One of my favorite pages from the Particle Data Group, showing exactly the effect you’re talking about. You can see “plateaus” where experiments settled on an “accepted” value, before some result kicked that idea aside.

You can wait for it to turn up on medium in another four days, see if it turns up on slashdot and read the comments, or wait to read the comments here, the latter two being “not bother to read the article”.

The summary, now, not even containing a minimal amount of information to think on.

You can wait for comments of the week which usually has some extra content that you can actually think on, though.

Brian / Ethan, Brian you’re really jumping to answer a bit quick there aren’t you. Do you know what gave rise to 20th Century quantum physics? An anomaly with a light bulb, essentially. Those great geniuses were willing to throw out all their brilliant work by calling out a crisis, over a spectral anomaly in a light bulb.
This generation and the last complain from one side of their mouths about how everything is so perfect they can’t find anomalies to drive new breakthroughs. And from the other side, hundreds of anomalies has passed massively larger than a lightbulb, and this same generation and the last, just retrospectively explained it all away in very unsatisfactory terms and then bolted something on to the standard model.

I’m sorry but culture that you’ve been trained and become professional into has had you just do the same thing, and walk away feeling like you’ve done a good job. Thrown out a couple reasonable soundings maybe’s and, I would predict and you will know the answer in private at least, that it all just suddenly didn’t look like a big problem, and not a really a problem at all. It flew out of your head didn’t it?

The truth we don’t know what’s right or wrong at this point, because since the last 1960’s serious challenges to the expanding universe big bang thing have not been properly answered.

Ethan’s airbrushing or Walton Arp’s work is a great example. Ethan thinks Arp was guilty of sampling small sizes. That is Ethan buying into what he was told. In fact if Ethan put a scientific hat and went and looked at the stages of what happened, he’ll find – was would you or anyone – that Arp was continually going and getting what he was being asked to get. And the way that went was they stopped publishing him.
For example, Ethan, you say small samples. I think I can guess the stage you mean. So…small samples. Why was he sampling? Because he previously published a COMPLETE survey of the sky that showed the pairs – yes? – the pairs were correlated with x-ray sources – that have only ever been linked with Quasars…..at 7.5 sigmas.
But the problem for the community was that those sources were not high redshift. So they had no answer (and no one bothered investigating since) so what they said was “We need hard examples”. So then he went and found examples. So then they said “these are just samples” and statistical correlates (at approx. 7 sigma) we need hard visual spectral evidence”
So he goes and painstakingly finds visual spectra examples – probably very hard to do because it needs a spectral process frame which would be narrow. But he delivers.
And do you know what they said? They said it wasn’t there. The guys running the big telescopes said it was there.
But now it’s getting confirmed by amateurs all over the world, with half metre telescopes.
And what does it mean, what Arp. We won’t know until scientists pick it up. Which might require the lot of you being thrown out and living in infamy for billions and billions and decades in time.
And Arp is just ONE of many. Why do you want this.

Everyone. Ethan. Go back to my last comment to Wow which is about two down the list and I’m pasting what it says on the side if you do this later
“Chris Mannering on Comments of the Week #93: from interstellar travel to an unknown monster”

Go and look at what I say to Wow. This guy just sits mirroring. Ethan, you talk the big stuff about fairness. But you allow this abusive person to attack and undermine friendly strangers continuously with impunity. And it has to because you are too lazy to actually analyse a few exchanges start to finish. And Ethan that is immoral and makes a mockery of all your stances on fairness. They may be legitimate, but for you they have to be nothing more than self-serving political correctness. Shame.

Maybe the explanation is that Wow is Ethan after all. Seems very unlikely as they are so different and Wow occasionally disagrees with Ethan. But there has to be an explanation – you know what Sherlock said.
And what is the single question people he abuses ask themselves the most often, the most of them?
Is he for real?

The irrationality is worsening somewhat as ….is it me or have your responses been rather unlike the norm? I would definitely predict that your response to the comment before last would be your mirror-spiel followed by the unreal “I’m the victim here” splurge.

Great introduction, but where’s the rest of the article where you try to answer the question in the title? I was expecting to hear some justification for skepticism about stuff like Inflation and Dark Energy, but you hardly mentioned any of the conceptual tripwires.